For some parents picky eating means their kids won’t eat most vegetables or fruits and prefer a steady diet of pasta with butter, potatoes in any form, chicken, beef, cheese, milk, cereals, breads, rice, eggs, and sandwiches. I definitely feel for parents with kids who won’t eat any produce but will eat grains and meat and dairy. I still envy them enough that if I had a ransom to give in exchange for my kid eating such a wide variety of foods, I would happily be poor but able to feed my child. Sadly, I’m already poor and my child won’t eat most of those foods.
Then there’s the few of us with kids who eat 10 or less food items at any given period of time. Think about what that would mean to you. What if your child didn’t like meat, hated nearly all dairy, choked on almost all fresh produce, disliked most cereals, bars, nuts, and grains? What would you feed your kid? How would your kid grow up to be healthy? How would you deal with the fact that your child would prefer it if all food but dessert and a select few other items could simply be swallowed in gel-cap form? How would you feel? How capable of a parent would you consider yourself? Would you blame your child? Would you fight your child over food every single day? Would you give up trying?
When my kid first started eating food as a baby he ate almost everything. He ate pureed greens, carrots, squash, fruit, and cereals. There were few things I put in front of him that he wasn’t willing to eat. I mashed bananas until he could eat them himself, he ate almost a banana a day until he was two years old. He liked peanut butter and jam sandwiches, baked beans with grilled cheese sandwiches, lentil and chard soup pureed and scooped up on crackers, feta cheese, avocado, melon, pears, peaches, and he would even eat potatoes.
The change happened so gradually I can’t possibly say exactly when we realized Max’s palate was changing. It wasn’t overnight. Slowly he started rejecting foods he previously liked and no power on earth could make him swallow a banana by the time he was two. Other things were happening at the same time but the most dramatic was his powerful refusal to wear denim. Later, when he could talk, he told me it was because it didn’t feel good. It was rough. Anyway, slowly his diet whittled down to mostly carbohydrates and we consulted our pediatrician.
The pediatrician said it was a fairly normal stage many children go through. Her advice was to continue to offer healthy foods at every meal and he would probably grow out of it. He did not grow out of it. Another year and another pediatrician visit and more advice to always offer healthy food but not to freak out if Max only wanted to eat crackers. We already noticed other troubling trends in our child and considering these the doctor told us that we had a choice to make food a daily battle (I was making it a daily battle and crying all the time over the fact that he wouldn’t eat much of what I offered) but warned that I could potentially create an eating disorder by fighting at every meal with my child.
A child like Max.
She suggested we be careful about choosing our battles with him. She told me that my job was to never give up offering him wholesome food. If he chose only to eat crackers he probably wouldn’t die, would most likely grow out of it, and we could give him multivitamins.
I have never given up trying to get him to eat wholesome food. I am an excellent cook and the biggest crime I commit in my diet is too much fat. We eat a lot of fresh produce, whole grains, not much packaged crap, not too much salt or sugar, and we eat a truly varied diet. To have an extreme picky eater for a child has been an enormous emotional strain on us and on our budget. Packaged crackers aren’t cheap. Instead of growing out of the picky eating it has simply grown worse.
I started writing about this issue on Dustpan Alley and have realized that it’s time I write about it here. Not for people with kids who will eat some things they don’t like with some applied parental pressure or threats or promise of dessert, I want to write about it for those parents like us, who have struggled so hard over the basic job of feeding our child, who have shed a lot of tears, torn out a lot of hair, and thrown out a shameful quantity of rejected food.
I get so angry listening to parents telling me how to get my kid over his picky eating. There is a general assumption out there that if you just keep forcing your kid to try something (they say it takes twelve times) they will eventually like it. Or that if you just refuse to feed them outside the meals you cook for yourself they will eventually just choose to eat what you put in front of them (“no child will ever choose to starve themselves”). Or that if a child doesn’t like much food it’s because the parents don’t eat good wholesome food themselves. Or that they aren’t good cooks.
I would like to offer some general advice right now:
1. Never stop offering healthy food for your child to eat no matter how exhausting it is and how frustrated you are.
2. Give your kid a multivitamin that includes iron.*
3. If your kid only likes packaged food (crackers and things like that) be careful to read labels and don’t allow any high fructose corn syrup, preservatives, food coloring, or other harmful ingredients into your cupboards.
4. Don’t let other parents make you feel like a failure. I once had a neighbor suggest that the reason my kid didn’t eat healthily was because I wasn’t cooking good enough food. I have rarely had such a terrible urge to slap another woman as I did at that moment. Her kids would eat kale raw and she assumed it was her awesomeness as a mother that made her kids like everything. Most people will view picking eating as a failing of the parents or of the child or both. Don’t let them get under your skin.
5. Be compassionate with your picky eater and with yourself.
*Even finding multi-vitamin my kid will take has been a miserable ever changing drag. The flavors of
most multi-vitamins are repugnant to him. He finally begged for a pill to swallow but the one I found was enormous and the serving size was three a day and he could taste them going down. I have finally found a multi-vitamin in a gel-cap which goes down more easily and he can’t taste.
I have never had Beef Stroganoff because my mom raised me as a vegetarian. I have no idea what the traditional dish should taste like but this recipe is my version of the dish my mom came up with as a vegetarian alternative. I have settled into a routine of making it without thinking about it and it has quietly evolved over the years. As I’ve been making it recently I couldn’t remember if I used to put garlic in it. I love garlic but if it was ever part of the original dish my mom created, I can’t remember. What I offer here is the version I’m making right now. 
Tofu Stroganoff Recipe
Most chimichurri sauce has either a little or a lot of parsley, many have cilantro in varying amounts, and a few even have oregano or other curious herbs. This chimichurri sauce is the closest I could come to recreating one from memory that I had at a catered birthday party which then haunted me for weeks; it has more cilantro than parsley and no other green herbs.
Last year I learned to make Mexican style rice from a cookbook called “
This picture was taken before adding the cilantro- it’s very good this way too but I can’t get enough cilantro so I prefer adding it in. Plus-green is pretty!
Baking squash might seem too ridiculous to an experienced cook to explain but considering how many people I’ve met who’ve never baked their own pumpkin for pie, I think it’s important to cover the basics. I like to think that if I died before teaching my son how to cook, he could come to my homesteading blog to learn how to do the basic things that mothers tend to teach their children in the kitchen before they ever set eyes on their first cookbook.
Acorn squash are usually a dark green on the exterior (the ones in these pictures are mutants from a local farmer!) and medium to light yellow on the interior. Their flesh is somewhat stringy and a little on the watery side compared to sugar pumpkins or other large squash.
3. Using a strong metal spoon scrape the seeds and the most fibrous part of the squash cavity out.
4. Place face down on a sturdy baking sheet. Preferably not a non-stick.
There’s no denying that these were better than the baked version, but worth the stench and the danger? 
What’s the difference between polenta and cornmeal? Nothing. Polenta is boiled cornmeal. You can make polenta using a fine, medium, or course grind of cornmeal which will determine how long it takes to cook. The coarsely ground polenta will take at least 45 minutes to cook, sometimes longer. I personally prefer a medium to fine grind because it’s silkier but a lot of my friends and family prefer the coarser grinds for the grainier texture.
I don’t often make 
Peeling shallots takes a lot of time. The ones from the store are
Unfortunately, the experiment didn’t prove successful. Yes, shallots can roast well in their skins but they are just as difficult to remove when they’re sticky as when they’re dry. Most importantly, the bulbs that were skinned first got browned nicely whereas the ones left in their skin were browned on the skins only. So the lesson is: peel your shallots. Even though it’s a pain in the butt. Better yet, assign a minion to do the peeling.
Ciabatta, Caramelized Shallots, and Brie with 
Method:
Recipe Notes: If you can’t get your hands on sour cherries, cranberries would make an excellent substitute. The important thing is to make a sauce that is both tart and sweet. The shallots are sweet by themselves so using a fruit that is just sweet will result in a somewhat vapid experience. A red currant sauce might be good here too. Please don’t use sweet cherries. They don’t work. 
